Way back in 2006 I created one of the many affiliate marketing sites that have been giving a handy modest return (not easy when your a one man band, with a full time job, and enjoy spending time with your family!). The site was Bingo Tonight and I wanted to learn from the headaches of a previous site Financeland on how to publish database driven content in a url re-write friendly manner from a handful of templates (views) so I could put new offers, reviews up and have them easily crawled with keywords in the URL for SEO juice.

So instead of the httphandlers and component installed on IIS to handle the financeland article redirects the simple use of a custom 404 page using server.execute served my purposes, detecting from the first part of the URL after the domain what the type of request was (controller), then using backslash separated parameters “folders” to select the records (parameters).

So as I’m here in 2011 going through the MVC 3 music store tutorial application… it’s not entirely that unfamiliar to grasp the concept of turning URLs into dynamic pages through a limited set of classes.

Edit: ahhhh most of the way through the music store tutorial now and I’m seeing the power of MVC scaffolded views… yep.. that’s a very nice timesaver indeed!, the razor engine is very nice and clean to code with by the look of it.

Twice I called play.com customer services to find out when the wii + balance board console would be delivered given it went from 1-2 weeks delay at ordering to being 3-5 weeks after waiting for one week.

On both calls I got the usual sort of stuff you expect to hear when you call up someone and they can’t really help you (although I did request them to send the in-stock bundled items and send the rest when in stock which they refused); but also I was told on both occasions that as my card had not been charged yet I could cancel the order if I wanted to.

So I did, after 2 weeks of waiting for play.com selling this for £240 with an ongoing delay of over a month, I found John Lewis selling the same black console with sports and sports resort with motionplus for £150 which you could pick up from a store the following day. Also the balance board was expected in stock at amazon.co.uk around a week later for £85, so I called them up to ask if I placed an order online I would be sure to get one of that consignment and indeed that is the case.

I picked up the wii last saturday and have enjoyed it for 3 days now it’s a really great console, and amazon will have the remaining item wii fit plus with balance board here tomorrow (5 days earlier than expected)

So I cancel with play and less than a week later I get what I ordered from two other retailers and save £5.